Stop auto correction of number into a date

Anonymous
2010-04-09T11:08:55+00:00

When i work with excel, i do data entry, some of the numbers that i type in can be interpenetrated  as dates. when this happens excel automatically changes the format of the cell from general, to date. i want to be able to stop this auto correction.

I know there are a number of ways to avoid this happening, but i am fed up with these methods. i simply what to turn the auto correct off, so that instead of what i type into the cell changing, what i type into the cell shows exactly what i typed in.

really hope there is someone out the who knows how to do this.

thanks

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2010-04-09T17:09:58+00:00

If you format the cells as Text, all entries will be entered as text

(leading zeroes will be retain, date-like values won't be converted to dates, etc)

...CTRL+1 (to view the formatting dialog window)

...Select: Number_tab...Category: Text

That should resolve most (but not all) of the problem.

Does that work for you?

Ron Coderre

Microsoft MVP - Excel (2006 - 2010)

P.S. If any post answers your question, please mark it as the Answer (so it won't keep showing as an open item.)

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Anonymous
2010-04-09T16:55:47+00:00

Tim

I understand your frustration but this is not an autocorrect issue. 

Typing in 1/5 will automatically be recognised as a date as that is what it is unless... you signify that it is a formula and you expect the answer 0.2 to appear or it is a text item in which case you must preceed the data with a ' apostrophy.

In signifying the that the item is text you will have a data item which is left aligned, as all text is by default.  All other items in this column (even if purely numeric such as product codes) should aligned left.  Product codes though numeric should never be treaded like numbers, if you do, then expect issues.  Telephone numbers are similarly not true numbers, if they were treated as such, leading zeros would be dropped.

Though the whole idea of having to type in that extra character of ' is a pain to remember, it will make your data more acurate, reliable and portable.

Pat PS If you found this useful please vote. Thank you:¬)

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-08-10T19:42:33+00:00

    So it also autocorrects to time as well as dates? Lovely. I didn't know that (at least I don't recall encountering that problem).

    If anyone who works at Microsoft monitors this thread can you please send it to the engineers who actually do the programming of Excel? Like I've said before I love excel and use it every day, but I see absolutely no reason why there isn't an option to disable this. I have never used excel, in the 17 years I've been using it, to enter dates or times.

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  2. Anonymous
    2012-08-10T09:43:10+00:00

    Not likely to be a popular answer, but the way I worked around this was to write an import app using OpenXML.  If I send a string like "3 A" via COM (as programmatic copy/paste special) it turns up as "3:00 AM". If I create and populate the cell using the Open XML SDK, then I have enough control to ensure my "3 A" is preserved, and that the cell format type remains General.

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  3. Anonymous
    2012-05-30T20:54:06+00:00

    (Sorry, Czad, this is meant to be a post to the thread, but the only button I have is "Reply." It's just par for the course really.)

    It's absolutely astounding that there is no way to disable this. Pasting anything from word to excel is a nightmare because you never know where or how your data is going to get mangled. The solution of putting an ' works, but it requires me to do a bunch of copying/replacing in the text I want to paste into excel. 

    Microsoft, we all know you pretty much suck, but this is bad even for you. Google: "excel turn off date autoformat" and look at the results. Thousands of your users are having this problem. Would it really be too much to ask for you to just design software that does what people want rather than what you've decided they should want?

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